Regulars will recall my dialogue with a certain motor car company and its dealership, when bits of a newish car went scrofulous. That process persuaded me that persistence can pay - or, at least, mitigate losses.
Though I’ve been using a smartphone for years now, I’ve never given up on my ancient GSM Nokia thickphone. For a time, my late mother-in-law used it in her care home. She got it from me as a hand-me-down, and she died over twelve years ago, so it is no spring chicken. I last used it to make a call from a ship at sea when the fancy-dancy iPhone couldn’t see a transmitter, and it still had £20-odd worth of credit on the SIM. That must have been last December. Meanwhile, Vodafone has introduced a rule by which unused numbers are disconnected after 90 days. In fact, they disconnected mine after nine months.
Well, yesterday I found an on-line Vodafone dialogue site, and eventually persuaded a distant person to reconnect the number. When I checked this morning, the number had been reconnected, but the credit showed as zero. I eventually managed to find the dialogue site again, and enquired why this should be so. Vodafone’s story is that, when a number is disconnected, any remaining credit ‘is vanished’. At this point my stubbornness index kicked in. ‘That is unacceptable, [name of correspondent]. If I had been told this would happen, I’d have taken the necessary action.’ Same answer repeated. ‘Thanks for the explanation. Would you be so kind as to connect me to your team leader?’
Cutting a long and doubtless deadly boring story short, I now have a working thickphone with £20 credit on it, and it sends and receives. Apart from one use of the word ‘theft’, I stuck to courtly courtesy throughout, and addressed my correspondent by the stated name. That, together with a good ration of Hartnäckigkeit, has paid dividends. Just wish I’d estimated the outstanding credit at £150, but that wouldn’t really be me, would it?
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